The Remedy for Love: A Novel by Bill Roorbach Page B

everything. He’d smashed it into that door at Mia Arnold’s repeatedly. He felt lucky it hadn’t worked. Imagine facing Mia Arnold in the morning!
    He could see the corner of a full bookshelf up in Danielle’s loft, but of course there was no way to get near that. By the mission-oak couch in a matching oak cabinet (fine carpentry, old-fashioned click of brass), he found board games and puzzles, also a copy of Thoreau’s
The Maine Woods,
a book you’d find in many a summerhouse in the North Country. He settled in with the kerosene lamp to read about the mountain Thoreau had called Ktaadn.
“Contact!”
he read, the old leather cushions crunching under his every movement, horsehair in there, hard as rock. But quickly he was absorbed: Those canny young men! A century and a half away! Traveling by bateau from Bangor and all the way to the mountain, paddling, carrying, retracing their steps, forging ahead, seventy-five miles or more! He picked up his feet, folded them under him—the floor was all the way icy, but he realized the wind no longer rose up from its many cracks, not at all: the snowfall had already been sufficient to form an insulating barrier. Thoreau’s wonderful figures of speech, the freshness of his mind, the architecture of his thoughts, his people! Eric had forgotten all that.
    “Contact!”
    He reached for his phone to look up more about the storm. Of course there was no phone. He read a little more Thoreau—competitive young man leaving his companions behind to summit among the rocks of the great mountain. And again checked for his phone, which might have been amusing if it weren’t so pathetic. He opened the cabinet again, that satisfying click. Awkwardly (trying to avoid putting his feet on the icy floor), he pulled out one puzzle then the next, settled on a large one—1000 PIECES —thick, flaky cardboard probably produced in the 1950s, large photo of Lichtenstein Castle, which he knew to be in Germany.
    He and Alison had met as teenagers at a Future Lawyers of Maine retreat on Lake Damariscotta, a high-octane weekend culminating with a moot court. They’d been on the same team, she two years older, very impressive, commanding, intimidating. Years later—they were both already real lawyers—he was solo hiking the Piazza Rock portion of the Appalachian Trail near Saddleback Mountain and recognized her struggling into her backpack in front of the shelter near the massive cantilevered rock. She had no memory of him till he reminded her of a quip he’d made in moot court after she’d warned their team to defer to the bench: “The judge is, like, fifteen.”
    Hiking, she was with a group she didn’t like from the office she was tired of, a tax firm in Boston, and walked with Eric hours to the top of the mountain—an incredible granite bald with a view of heaven. Her group was walking out via the ski slopes and so he did, too, and accepted a ride back to his car. The next month, after increasingly warm phone calls between them, he visited her in Boston, tiniest apartment imaginable, Beacon Hill. She met him in front and rode with him to park his car, the shiny VW Golf his father had given him for graduation, pretty small. Still, they managed to get half their clothes off and declare their love and make love in a cheap parking garage she knew. Then again at her apartment in her fresh sheets and with her doleful old dog Bruno watching. They had a natural fit, they agreed. Much later she’d deny saying anything of the sort. He’d found her overly starving and frank and perverse but of course didn’t say it, barely allowed himself to think it, later got over it, got into it, got hurt when she backed away, and backed away further. The jigsaw puzzle had a smell to it that was the smell of that apartment. Dry cardboard, whiff of decay, whiff of mold, and a kind of perfume: old bar of travel soap tucked into the box, probably someone’s effort at mouse proofing.
    He dumped the thousand pieces on